User:Morganlebeda/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Political communication

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because political communication is very interesting to me, within the fact of trying to understand how they communicate to the public. Political communication also has a huge impact on society, whoever is within the political world, has a lot of power over society.

Evaluate the article
This article overall has a lot of information from outside resources and uses people as examples that play roles within Political Communication. When it comes to the media side of this article, it contains one picture with a short caption, but this article pulls a lot of information from different news channels. Which makes sense because the news typically is the main way of communication of what is going on within the political world, the news is also the fastest way to get a message out to the world. The articles organization is very clean, it is divided into different topics, then go into detail about how that topic is related to political communications.

Lead Section: This lead section defines what political communication is. It then goes into a little bit of the historical aspect of how political communication has grown and how it is growing. I do not think that the lead is over detailed, I think it opens up with the topic and explains the brief explanation of what political communication is, then through out the article, it goes into detail.

Content: All of the content is relevant to the topic, it does not necessarily flow from one to another but it is very informational. It goes into depth about what types of political communication is being portrayed or it provides definitions of the different types of political communication. This article does not really hit the point of very historical aspects, but it talks about past data within the past decade, so it provides some historical factors but not very long ago.

Tone and Balance: This article mainly talks about the United States political communication. They have a small touch on the topic of the Middle-East political communication but it is only to inform and show how the political system/communication is different from America. I do not think this article try's to favorite one political party at all, it provides example of how all different types of political positions talk, but it does not favor a side or position. After they define the concept of this article, they mainly explain the ways of how the United States portrays political communication, they also use the "Bush Administration" for a big example.

Source and References: I feel like they have a lot of good sources and information for the topic of the United States political communication, but when they switch the topic to the Middle-East the information is short and there is not that much creditable sources. They are bale to bring in more national data when they talk about social media and how it impacts the communication between different countries and their political conflicts of communication. All of the links that I clicked on for further information were able to take me straight to the page that I needed, so there was nothing wrong within the links to more information.

Organization and writing quality: There is a handful of government related words that I personally did not understand but when I clicked on the word it was able to be defined. It is a easy article to read, it is on the shorter side but it provides a it of information that relates to the topic and also provides some statistical data, so they have information for the reader and it looks like they know what they are truly talking about. The only section that kind of threw me off was the "Fields and areas of study", this section provided good information with good definitions but there was not a lot of content to try and help the reader understand why these aeras of study are being used within political communication.

Images and Media: The article provided one picture at the very beginning of the article of George W. Bush giving a speech, that is the only picture provided in the article. There is not a lot of information as to why they used this picture, it is just put at the top and then they go right into the article. I like the concept of showing political people showing a version of mass communication but I wish there was more relation/correlation toward the picture.

Talk Page discussion: They have small conversations and inputs on the information about the United States examples that were being provided. There will always be a conflict between what example is chosen because there are political parties that always have something to say about the opposing political party. This article has been listed as a "level-5 vital article", and it has also been involved with a handful of WikiProjects. Another topic brought up in discussion was social media and how it has a huge impact on society with the mass spread of communication and how quickly the message can be spread, but social media also changes everyday so it is hard to portray information when it changes daily.

Overall Impressions: The overall status of this article is very informational and provides a lot of different sources with data to help the reader understand more about political communication. The article is great in the aspect of informing how the United States uses political communication because of our government system. If there was more information on other types of government and how their political society communicates to their countries would be good so we would be able to compare and contrast the two. The article is very well developed and organized, there are a lot of definitions provided, along with data and it is organized by different titles and areas of focus.